Sounds like they are going to continue to release the mozilla suite as the mozilla suite forever (or atleast untill there is no demand for it) and try to package thunderbird firebird into a new suite in 2004. Two seperate suites? Or possibly mozilla 2.0 suite and mozilla 1.xx suite in which the 1.x branch in maintained indefinatly. I'd vote for the second.

I for the life of me fail to see the big deal about all this fuss about switching from the sweet over to independent pieces. The suite has a large fan base, and many people use it and love it, as do Mozilla Firebird and Mozilla Thunderbird. It makes no sense to harp about the fact that the suite is still around and isn't being replaced in 1.6. I can't honestly see it being replaced anytime in the near future, and saying it will happen in early 2004 is merely someone's guess. The products that everyone likes to use and favor exist now - sure they may not be the 'flagship' Mozilla product (refering to Firebird and Thunderbird) but they are available.

The arguement over the numbering scheme is also pretty petty... about as petty as putting a splash screen in Firebird. The products are based upon tried and sound Seamonkey code, so what is the difference if your are running 0.7 as opposed to 1.0? If it isn't crashing be happy with it.

Personally I think the developers opened a can of worms by stating we are 'soon' changing from an application suite to independent products without a concrete timeline when the change would happen step by step. The only thing that is certain is that it will happen at some point in the future, but proponents of the suite are likely to continue to develop it as well. That's the great thing about open source software. We all have our favorite toys.

Given that the change from the suite to components is planned, for me the fuss is getting them to do it as soon as possible so there aren't multiple versions with their own quirks, installers, etc., that each get less testing (as some use the suite, some use the components), and that can require different installers for third party bits, etc. I'd rather see the advancement of Mozilla freeze for a bit, and do the switchover all in one big step -- even at the cost of a slight retrograde at first -- because the end result should pay off.

I just think it will simplify development and improve product quality. Sure, producing both products is nice, but the potential of either product is hurt if resources are being used for another product.

> so what is the difference if your are running 0.7 as opposed to 1.0? If it isn't crashing be happy with it.
Uh, the fact that it is crashing - or certianly has been e.g. the infamous 0.6 autocomplete bug in Firebird? The fact that the interface is in a state of flux? The fact that there is no installer and people installing 0.7 found that their scrollbars had disappeared because of theme compatability problems? The fact that the new XUL toolkit has to be stable by 1.0? The fact that there are dozens of other bugs that the developers want to fix before they label their product 1.0 and remove the 'technology preview' disclaimer?

Just because the *birds are separate apps doesn't mean they can't be bundled together as a "sweet". Microsoft Office is a suite, yet that is a collection separate applications and components. I for one can't wait for them to dump the monolithic app and replace it with a suite of separate applications. Right now though, the independent parts aren't ready. Having everything in one single process space was a stupid decision when Netscape made it all those years ago... repeating that mistake with the open source reimplementation beggars belief.

I for the life of me fail to see the big deal about all this fuss about switching from the sweet over to independent pieces. The suite has a large fan base, and many people use it and love it, as do Mozilla Firebird and Mozilla Thunderbird. It makes no sense to harp about the fact that the suite is still around and isn't being replaced in 1.6. I can't honestly see it being replaced anytime in the near future, and saying it will happen in early 2004 is merely someone's guess. The products that everyone likes to use and favor exist now - sure they may not be the 'flagship' Mozilla product (refering to Firebird and Thunderbird) but they are available.

The arguement over the numbering scheme is also pretty petty... about as petty as putting a splash screen in Firebird. The products are based upon tried and sound Seamonkey code, so what is the difference if your are running 0.7 as opposed to 1.0? If it isn't crashing be happy with it.

Personally I think the developers opened a can of worms by stating we are 'soon' changing from an application suite to independent products without a concrete timeline when the change would happen step by step. The only thing that is certain is that it will happen at some point in the future, but proponents of the suite are likely to continue to develop it as well. That's the great thing about open source software. We all have our favorite toys.

Too sad, a roadmap that will be implemented 1.5 years later seems to me like a roadmap that does not work :-(
I'm a litle sad, because the Mozilla-stand-alone-components-utopia might never be realized. If only all current applications in Mozilla AppSuite could be separated in diferent processes/thread ...

Three years since the return of the amazing ability to paste an image from the clipboard straight into an email like in netscape 4.8 was requested and still nothing. It was suggested for 1.6 but is nowhere to be seen and now after three years waiting and 600 dollars pledged they are discontinuing the software and moving to another version and we're going to have to start all over again. Oh woe. Over 600 dollars pledged to fix it and still no response are we going to be trapped using messenger 4.8 forever?

sad historic comment from bugzilla page

Additional Comment #13 From r***m 2001-08-09 14:12
moving this one over to 1.0, this will not make the 9.4 milestone

If seamonkey is dropped and development continues solely on firebird and thunderbird, what will applications like epiphany and galeon depend on?

Currently firebird and thunderbird depend on seamonkey as well (it's just selective compilation), we'll probably have to see a stage where the source code for seamonkey is torn apart and divided between the birds so they no longer depend on seamonkey. What's the story with the GRE these days?

I don't like the idea of a Mozilla 1.x and 2.x. This could provide some confusion. Version numbers are normally used to differenciate different versions of the same product, but that isn't the case here. Your run-of-the-mill end user might think that 2.x is just the next version of 1.x, so they either won't download 2.x because they don't like 1.x, or they'll download 2.x and not like it because it doesn't include a HTML editor, but won't download 1.x (which has an editor) because they won't realize that 1.x is a different product.

First of all... wasn't there a story here the other day about a stand-alone composer?

Secondly... why don't they strip the browser and mail/news from the monolithic app and bundle that with the *birds? Once the *birds have all the browser and mail/news functionality, there really won't be anything missing. As time goes by, other components can be stripped out of the monolithic app until there is only one thing left. It's all about UI and presentation, and the details can easily be hidden from the naive user.

I don't like the idea of a Mozilla 1.x and 2.x. This could provide some confusion. Version numbers are normally used to differenciate different versions of the same product, but that isn't the case here. Your run-of-the-mill end user might think that 2.x is just the next version of 1.x, so they either won't download 2.x because they don't like 1.x, or they'll download 2.x and not like it because it doesn't include a HTML editor, but won't download 1.x (which has an editor) because they won't realize that 1.x is a different product.

I think the significance of the 1.x branch is that it is supposed to maintain the same APIs as 1.0. Mozilla promised to keep this compatibility for at least as long as the 1.x branch. If the Firebird APIs are different, then we will have to switch to the 2.x series.

A lot of half-arsed ideas here about the split... personally I see no big deal - *bird aren't near finished yet, they are still essentially beta software, at least until they are ready for prime time seamonkey development will continue - WELL DUH.

I know that often features aren't exactly fully determined by alpha freeze ;) but just out of interest, is there anything new planned/likely for 1.6? 1.5 had the spellchecker plus 'invisible' improvements to layout and such. I assume there will be more such hidden improvements in 1.6, but are there going to be any visible new features? Or is that type of work on seamonkey essentially over?

There will hopefully be some changes to "save as" that will improve it. There will be GNOME integration of helper apps on Linux. There will be the ability to set up external protocol handlers on Linux. This is just user-visible changes to the helper-app code (and most of these will apply to the *Birds too). Dunno about other parts of Mozilla.

I don't see anything good in the developments of the past 6 months in Mozilla. Progress seems slower than usual. The wait and seers are eternally waiting and seeing, years after the beginning of the project. And even as the organization is coming closer together it's primary product is fragmenting itself into oblivion. One half of it is ugly, drab and bulky, and the other quarters/eigths/whatever you want to call the *bird philosophy, aren't not as full featured and cartoonish to the point of blowing Luna out of the water (heck, even my very-much-feminine fiancee won't use it because it looks too girly). There's little to no hope for the calendar project, and even less for a calendar/mail integrated suite or PIM. Mozilla's technology has been used, abused, and rejected like a red-headed stepchild from the backer of its most popular iteration, Netscape (leaving the only iteration to lie in the very unattractive name 'Mozilla'). Everyone sees optimism at this time in the history of Mozilla, but I see that these are dark times. I don't mean to be so negative, I really wish I weren't. I've been following it since Netscape 6 and have used it for its standards support and all... but sometimes you've got to see the writing on the proverbial wall.

I agree that at the user-level the mozilla experience hasn't gained much recently. 1.4 and 1.5 have not introduced many frills, whereas from 1.0 to 1.3 we have seen plenty: type ahead find, bayesian filters and whatnot.

I think we'll see good stuff coming from the composer, and hopefully calendar. It's a pity that the switch to a modular suite is taking so long, my hunch is that this may be a cause of the lag in pushing new prodcuts/features.

Here's some of what is visibly new:
* Mozilla on Windows has NTLM authentication. This enables Mozilla to talk to MS web and proxy servers that are configured to use "windows integrated security". /I guess before this was possible with Internet Explorer only.
* Site icons in the Bookmark Manager and Bookmarks Sidebar, and separators now have support for labels. /I remember that was there since IE4.
* Composer now supports click and drag dynamic image and table resizing. If an image is selected or if the caret is placed inside a table, eight resizing handles appear and allow to resize the image/table with a simple click/drag/release. In the case of an image, the resizing is done real-time and a semi-opaque shadow of the image at its target size is shown during resizing. A tooltip shows in real-time the target size in pixels, and the relative change in pixels too.
* Users can now specify "blank page," "home page," or "Last page visited" for each of first window, new window and new tab.
* Users can now specify default font, size and color for HTML mail compose.
* Image blocking/disabling is now more flexible and users can "view image" to see blocked or not loaded images.
* "Launch file" after downloading has been enabled for .exe files /I remember this was in IE since at least version 5. Previously one had to open the containing folder in Mozilla.
* Proxy auto-config (PAC) failover has been implemented. /I don't know what this could be.

So some features are those that Internet Explorer does not have and some features are those that have been long before in Internet Explorer. Most changes have been done to Composer, 1.4.1 contains many usability, stability and standards support improvements.

I used to use 1.2.1 as the default, and while I did get spoiled with Firebird's use of pop-up blocking, I kept using 1.2.1 until I saw a fault in its rendering /might have been my own bad coding in PHP, I'm a beginner there. In any way, 1.3.1 rendered fine and had a selective pop-up blocker with which I was spoiled in Mozilla Firebird. So currently I will only stick with 1.3.1.

In another computer, I used 1.1, but then it crashed on very rare occasions, but since I was anyway spoiled with Mozilla not crashing at all, and since I needed to test a page with 1.2.1, I decided to put 1.2.1 on that computer.

And by the way, 1.1 is the last release to support CSS-coloured radio buttons and checkboxes (at least in Windows).